Many emerging and proposed sensing technologies raise questions about privacy and surveillance. For instance new wireless smarthome security cameras sound cool… until we’re using them to watch a little girl in her bedroom getting ready for school, which feels creepy, like in the tweet below.

Or consider the US Department of Homeland Security’s imagined future security system. Starting around 2007, they were trying to predict criminal behavior, pre-crime, like in Minority Report. They planned to use thermal sensing, computer vision, eye tracking, gait sensing, and other physiological signals. And supposedly it would “avoid all privacy issues.” And it’s pretty clear that privacy was not adequately addressed in this project, as found in an investigation by EPIC.

Image from publicintelligence.net. Note the middle bullet point in the middle column – “avoids all privacy issues.”

A lot of these types of products or ideas are proposed or publicly released – but somehow it seems like privacy hasn’t been adequately thought through beforehand. However, parallel to this, we see works of science fiction which often imagine social changes and effects related to technological change – and do so in situational, contextual, rich world-building ways. This led us to our starting hunch for our work:

perhaps we can leverage science fiction, through design fiction, to help us think through the values at stake in new and emerging technologies.

Designing for provocation and reflection might allow us to do a similar type of work through design that science fiction often does.

This is part 3 in a 3 part series of posts based on work I presented at Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) this year on analyzing concept videos. Read part 1, part 2, or find out more about the project on the project page or download the full paper.

After doing a close reading and analyzing the concept videos for Google Glass (a pair of glasses with a heads up display) and Microsoft HoloLens (a pair of augmented reality goggles), we also looked at media reaction to these videos and these products’ announcements.

After both concept videos were released, media authors used the videos as a starting point to further imagine the future world with Glass and HoloLens, and the implications of living in those worlds. Yet they portrayed the future in two different ways: some discussed the future by critiquing the world depicted in the companies’ concept videos, while others accepted the depicted worlds. We distinguish between these two orientations, terming them speculative and anticipatory.

This is part 2 in a 3 part series of posts based on work I presented at Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) this year on analyzing concept videos. Read part 1, part 3, or find out more about the project on the project page or download the full paper.

In this post, I walk through our close reading of the Glass and HoloLens concept videos and how they imagine potential futures. I then discuss how this analysis can be used to think about surveillance issues and other values associated with these representations of the future.

Google Glass Concept Video

Google’s concept video “Project Glass: One Day…” was released on April 4, 2012. The video portrays a day in the life of a male Glass user, as he makes his way around New York City. The video follows a single wearer throughout the day in New York City from when he wakes up until sunset. This video is shot entirely in a first person point of view, putting the video viewer in the place of a person wearing Glass.

This is part 1 in a 3 part series of posts based on work I presented at Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) this year on analyzing concept videos. Read part 2, part 3, or find out more about the project on the project page or download the full paper.

So What is a Concept Video?

I am defining concept video as a video created by a company, showing a new novel device or product that is not yet available for public purchase, though it might be in a few years. Concept videos depict what the world might be like if that device or product exists, and how people might interact with it or use it. An early example is Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video, while more contemporary examples include Amazon’s Prime Air video, Google’s Glass video, and Microsoft’s HoloLens video. (I’ll take a closer look at the latter two in a following blog post). Concept videos embed a vision about the social and technical future of computing: how computing will be done, for whom, by what means, and what the norms of that world will be.

CSCW 2016 (ACM’s conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing) took place in San Francisco last month. I attended (my second time at this conference!), and it was wonderful meeting new and old colleagues alike. I thought I would share some reflections and highlights that I’ve had from this year’s proceedings.

Privacy

Many papers addressed issues of privacy from a number of perspectives. Bo Zhang and Heng Xu study how behavioral nudges can shift behavior toward more privacy-conscious actions, rather than merely providing greater information transparency and hoping users will make better decisions. A nudge showing users how often an app accesses phone permissions made users feel creepy, while a nudge showing other users’ behaviors reduced users’ privacy concerns and elevated their comfort. I think there may be value in studying the emotional experience of privacy (such as creepiness), in addition to traditional measurements of disclosure and comfort. To me, the paper suggests a further ethical question about the use of paternalistic measures in privacy. Given that nudges could affect users’ behaviors both positively and negatively toward an app, how should we make ethical decisions when designing nudges into systems?

The curling world has recently been swept into debate over the role of new brooms. Even outlets such as Yahoo Sports and The Washington Post have reported about it. As a relatively new curler (I started a little over a year ago out of the San Francisco Bay Area Curling Club), and an early scholar studying people’s perceptions of and social effects of new technologies, this struck me as a particularly interesting debate, even if I’ve been watching this from a bit of a distance.

Curling – it’s that sport played on ice with the rocks and the brooms! (Photo by Peter Miller, used under a CC BY-NC-ND license.)

A quick primer on curling to the best of my ability (World Curling TV also has a great intro video on the sport’s basics for the uninitiated):

In the game, 1 player delivers a rock by pushing it down the ice. 2 other players sweep with brooms to guide the stone down the sheet of ice towards a particular position at the other end. Rocks curl as they travel, moving in an arced path. Sweeping with brooms reduces friction on the ice and makes the arced path straighter. This allows stones to move further and straighter. While sweepers can adjust the path of the rock to some degree, the path the rock takes is predominantly determined by the person delivering the rock. This person must deliver at the correct initial angle and speed, requiring precision and skill.

These aren’t the (corn) brooms you’re looking for. Unless you’re living in the 1940s.(Photo by Boston Public Library, used under a CC BY-NC-ND license)

The technologies of brooms have changed over time. We’ve moved from classic corn brooms to brooms with horsehair brushes, to synthetic nylon pads (that visually resemble something more akin to a mop or Swiffer). And these pads have improved over time too, with different companies offering specialized designs. For example, the Goldline Norway pad uses a waterproofing layer under the fabric (wet pads are less effective at sweeping), and has small ridges which reduces sweeping friction and help cleans dirt in the rock’s path. The BalancePlus EQ pad reflects more heat back to the ice and are also waterproofed.

You’re more likely to find brooms that look like these today. (Photo by Len Adams, used under a CC BY-NC-ND license)

But about a month ago, in early October 2015, a new type of broom pad caused debate and controversy among many in the curling community. Broom pads made by BalancePlus with “directional fabric,” as it has been dubbed, can direct stones in almost zig-zag-like directions with “magical” precision, rather than the normal arced path. This means the precision and skill needed to deliver or throw the rock diminishes greatly. Instead, sweepers can direct the rock almost anywhere they want it to go. While “directional fabric” heads have been available for some time now by other companies, the BalancePlus version took it to a new level, exaggerating the directional qualities available in other companies’ brooms. At the time, there were no formal rules banning the use of these types of brooms. Nor are there many formal rules on equipment players can use in general. There were calls to ban the brooms, many calling them unfair, or not in the spirit of curling. Many top level players signed a statement saying that they would not use the brooms. And on November 6, the World Curling Federation banned the brooms for the Pacific-Asia Curling Championships. Many people speculate more formal rules may be forthcoming, especially given the lead up to the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Diving into the world of design, this seems similar to Dunne and Raby’s concept of “critical design,” that design can be pushed beyond reinforcing values of consumer culture but instead be used provocatively for cultural critique. The strategy of pushing existing trends to the extreme is one strategy of critical design, also used by BalancePlus.

However, I wouldn’t go as far as calling these brooms as critical design – while intentionally provocative, they don’t go as far as cultural critique. Instead, I would call what they did something more akin to a provocative design intervention, or design provocation, as they do explicitly try to engage in what they see as a potentially troubling trend in curling technologies.

In that sense, BalancePlus’ creation of these brooms with “directional fabric” was a success in provoking and jumpstarting a conversation.

The resulting conversation raised concerns about not only “directional fabric” but the sport of curling more generally. In particular, three ways people talked about the brooms stand out:

The Future of the Sport. Many people note the traction that the sport has gained in the Winter Olympics, particularly with the addition of a new curling event in 2018, Mixed Doubles. The sports’ popularity has also been growing in the US in recent years. Part of this is done by cultivating an image of skilled athleticism in curling – both in the throwing and sweeping of rocks. The ability to easily control rocks through sweeping with directional fabrics diminishes the amount of athleticism needed for both throwing and sweeping. These concerns endanger curling’s growing reputation among a broader outside audience that may already be quick to question curling’s status as a sport.

Fairness is also appealed to in a couple of ways. On one hand, there is an argument about the fairness of skill development. Elite curlers put in years of work to improve their delivery, and these new brooms threaten to make that type of expertise unnecessary. Second, it is about the fairness of games. A team playing with directional fabric against a team without those types of brooms is at a significant advantage: they can make shots that the other team is physically unable to make. The (somewhat heated) response by Hardline Curling, another manufacturer of curling equipment who was already making brooms with something similar to directional fabric, wrote that their brooms are “fair” because anyone can buy them, and it’s not against the curling rules. That is technically true. Curling rules (http://www.worldcurling.org/rules-and-regulations-downloads) on equipment are quite slim, having less than 2 pages on equipment circa October 2015. The main rule is just that “No player shall cause damage to the ice surface by means of equipment…” (And yes, in curling, we take the quality of the ice surface quite seriously). Some people argue that directional fabrics ruin the ice surface, although that is contested as well. However, when people argue that directional fabrics aren’t “fair,” they’re usually not appealing to a technical definition or official rule in regards to fairness, but are appealing toward a different idea of fairness, which brings us to point three…

The Spirit of Curling. Curling prides itself on being a moral and ethical sport. The rulebook is relatively slim. At the non-elite level games are self-called. There are no referees, and players are expected to call their own penalties. It’s a friendly and close knit community. Fairness in this sense goes beyond the rulebook, rather to the social norms of the game and the social norms of the curling community. And in many ways, these social norms are what draw people to curling.

The conversation resulting from the broom contoversy reveals a pretty neat intertwining of technology (brooms), regulation (curling regulations), and norms (the spirit of curling). This is not a pure technical issue about brooms, but a debate that combines the technical issues of the brooms, current and possible future curling rules and regulations, and the norms among the curling community. Technologies, regulations, and norms are not separate entities, but deeply intertwined. And as seen, changes to one can provoke or push on the others. This similar to Jackson, Gillespie, and Payette’s Policy Knot, which looks at the ways design, policy, and practice are intertwined.

Thus, while the “directional fabric” brooms may seem like a scary thing at first, when we think of it as an intentionally provocative and noncommercial design, it becomes pretty cool and does some good work for us. It has highlighted a potentially troubling developing in broom technology and jumpstarted a conversation about how to mitigate these potential problems before they become widespread. In an age where law and policy are often perceived to be “behind” technology development, more design provocations and conceptual designs can be good for starting these types of conversations early on, and for having nuanced discussions. Law and policy aren’t always the things to be “fixed” or changed (though sometimes they should be). Other times however, we may look at ways to change technologies or social norms as ways to regulate in the face of new developments.

Provocative designs can help us anticipate and speculate the ways in which technologies, policies, norms, and people might interact (and react) in the future. And that’s definitely something we don’t want to just sweep away.

It may be easy to think of large distributed online groups like 4chan and Anonymous as groups of troublemakers, ruled by a mob mentality. However, Gabriella Coleman’s “Anonymous: From Lulz to Collective Action” provides a more complicated history and study of these groups, noting that they do have social organization and social norms. But what do these groups, along with WikiLeaks, represent in our society? Are they merely fringe groups? Troublemakers? Online cyber-bullies and mobs? Freedom fighters? Political activists? Perhaps because of their distributed nature and wide range of activities, there is some of all of these.

This is an argument we’re likely to keep having over the next few years: Are Anonymous cyber-vandals or vigorous grassroots protesters? On one hand, Web sites are property, and taking them down is stealing, in a way.

How should we view these groups both as a society, and through the law? Perhaps DDoS attacks are akin to protesting in front of a business, blocking access by amassing hundreds of protesters. How should the law look at these efforts? Has the law caught up to what the internet affords – perhaps our categories of cyber-terrorism and cyber-crime do not fully cover the range of marginal internet activities, and we need “less criminal” classifications for these actions.

In another view, could the protest work of Anonymous be seen as the antithesis to “slacktivism?” They do have very different routes – “slacktivism” based in mainstream open social media, and Anonymous in anonymous action, amongst a smaller set of actors. Perhaps this mirrors traditional activism, which is generally carried out by a smaller set of actors relative to the entire population.

The question we come back to is what do these groups represent, and how can we explain them? Coleman’s brief history of Anonymous points to the fact that an “unruly mob” definition does not really describe them. At the same time, Felix Stadler seems to posit that they create an online public sphere, but their numbers compared to all internet users are relatively small, and they tend to skew male. Another question to ask are what ideals are they promoting, especially in their support of Middle East revolutions – they seem to be based in a Western-dominant view that access to more information creates a freer, more democratic society, which may not always be true, such as in examples of Chinese youth having access to Western information, which they use in Chinese nationalistic arguments.

Perhaps for further academic study into these groups, online ethnographic research may be appropriate.